In recent years, the introduction and development of eXtensible Markup Language (“XML”) and other data-describing markup languages have led to a plethora of applications developed to utilize the flexibility and extensibility of XML and other such markup languages. A wide variety of systems have evolved that are capable of leveraging the advantages of extensible data-describing languages including, for example, e-commerce networks, mobile communication devices, personal data devices, and database systems. Because many systems developed to utilize these languages face significant power and space limitations, such systems benefit from techniques for processing markup-language document with limited memory and computational resource requirements.